E-mail management is commonly handled by ISPs that have user/subscribers, or by company servers located at facilities where the e-mail users are employed. A part of e-mail management comprises filtering for spam or virus control, but when such e-mail management is performed at the ISP or at the company server location, valuable communication bandwidth and computing resources are expended on routing, analyzing, and other handling of spurious e-mail traffic. Present e-mail management systems are further characterized by a lack of real-time monitoring, feedback, and updating of rules regarding e-mail traffic or SMTP connection situations. Thus, management and monitoring of e-mail traffic situations is commonly handled through human intervention.
Even if these concerns are addressed in modern e-mail management systems, the techniques typically employed to filter out unwanted spam messages is relatively ineffective as a whole. Specifically, as conventional techniques developed, so too did techniques employed by the senders of spam messages to circumvent many of even the most aggressive approaches. Making matters worse, even in situations where filtering techniques are successful in preventing unwanted messages from reaching their intended recipients, many otherwise valid messages are also blocked from delivery. Among the problems plaguing conventional systems employed for blocking unwanted messages is the phenomenon “spoofing” e-mail addresses to trick filtering system into believing the message is being sent by a valid sender. As a result, even filtering systems that employ “approved senders” configured by users are still ineffective against such attacks. Moreover, as mentioned above, if conventional systems are upgraded with available tools to assist in preventing such attacks, the end result typically is that many valid messages are prevented from reaching the user, which results in losses in both time and costs.